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I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

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Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#231

Post by Crontab »

kutkloon7 wrote: post #2

This is a very important reason why books, in general, contain better information that websites. On websites, people care a lot less about the correctness of the information. You can just update stuff later (of course, this doesn't always happen). Also, sites are a very volatile medium. I often bookmark pages with interesting information to read later, and it inevitably happens once in a while that a site went down a…

> I often bookmark pages with interesting information to read later, and it inevitably happens once in a while that a site went down and I just can't find the information anymore.

I've recently had this problem with some online fiction that I had bookmarked. Now, I was able to recover thanks to the Wayback Machine, but I really shouldn't depend on that.

I should really put some thought into archiving pages I like or getting a Pinboard account.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#232

Post by viddi »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #68
whatever_dude wrote: post #15

I've had a similar problem. In updating my portfolio site recently, I noticed a vast majority of links were dead. Not just live projects published maybe 3 years or more ago (I expect those to die). But also links to articles and mentions from barely one year ago, or links to award sites, and the like. With a site listing projects going back ~15 years, one can imagine how bad things were. I had to end up creating a li…

beware: robots.txt can retroactively clear archive.org data

To clear things up: robots.txt can retroactively hide content from the archive. If it's changed back to allowing the archive's crawler, content from before the ban can be accessed again.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#233

Post by kyledrake »

wcummings wrote: post #170
kyledrake wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I get this request quite a bit from people that sincerely miss web rings. I'm not sure how much of it is anachronistic nostalgia and how much of it is a true desire to bring it back. To give an example of this, I've gotten more than a few requests to add the Gopher protocol to Neocities.

But aren't web rings just composed of vanilla hyperlinks? Why does that need to be added as a feature? What's stopping people from making them now?

IIRC the old webrings had a CGI backend that would collect the addresses and then you would click "next" and it would take you to the next site. But yeah you could just make a vanilla one. You could also just make one outside of the context of Neocities.

But if the next site went down or didn't link to the next site correctly, you couldn't proceed. That was always my problem with webrings. They depended on each site to embed the ring code properly, and usually they didn't, so you were stuck trying to find a working one. It was a pretty lousy UX overall.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#234

Post by aendruk »

panglott wrote: post #59

"It was possible to get on a text-based version of the internet for free in many areas, using only a modem and a phone line. An entire section of Free $tuff From the Internet offers up a lengthy list of free-nets, grassroots phone systems that essentially allowed for free access to text-based online resources." Makes me want to try to read a Markdown-only Internet browser, which treats native Markdown documents as th…

I long for the day that browsers and search engines support RFC 7763.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#235

Post by twic »

> The Rolling Stones [...] actually streamed a concert on the platform in November of that year, using an online provider named MBone for some reason

"For some reason"! That's the flipping multicast backbone you're talking about there! One of the great lost dreams of the internet!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbone

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#236

Post by RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u »

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. For one, the 80/20 rule applied back then just as it does today, so most of what's lost is crap to begin with. It's no different than in the real world: surely nobody's lamenting that you can't pick up a copy of Fordyce's Sermons anymore (and I presume that it'd be long forgotten if not for Austen). While some valuable resources were undoubtedly lost, most live on re-posted elsewhere, like memes, but in a "good" way.

Secondly, the book is more analogous to a map or dictionary, and it ought to be a descriptive source, not a prescriptive one. Some language purists may disagree, but I could care less :-). And similar to an old, outdated, map, you'd expect that the details may have changed, but the landmarks are most likely still accurate. NASA's still nasa.gov, MIT's still mit.edu -- well, IIRC www.mit.edu used to point to their library's portal, and web.mit.edu their main page; I see that's changed -- and CompuServ still...exists.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#237

Post by CaptSpify »

overcast wrote: post #223
CaptSpify wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it does. The grandparent is saying that we should have a higher quality web, and you are saying that we should have a more dynamic web.

I'm not saying we should have a more dynamic one. But JS fundamentally changed how we interact with websites, and it's here to stay. The majority of big players in the last decaded wouldn't have existed without the dynamic interaction. Saying we should go back to static only, is nonsense.

I completely disagree. The majority of big players has poisoned the waterhole. They've made the web less usable because of how they've made things dynamic. I think going back to static would have some negative impact, but it would make things better for everyone overall.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#238

Post by wcummings »

kyledrake wrote: post #233
wcummings wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But aren't web rings just composed of vanilla hyperlinks? Why does that need to be added as a feature? What's stopping people from making them now?

IIRC the old webrings had a CGI backend that would collect the addresses and then you would click "next" and it would take you to the next site. But yeah you could just make a vanilla one. You could also just make one outside of the context of Neocities. But if the next site went down or didn't link to the next site correctly, you couldn't proceed. That was always my problem with webrings. They depended on each site…

That's interesting the ones I remember were literally rings of static links, coordinated by the webmasters, presumably over email. I see what you mean now.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#239

Post by qrbLPHiKpiux »

CharlesDodgson wrote: post #45

I miss the optimism of the early web, when you could create a simple web page, join a web ring and going online was an event. It's richer and deeper now, but the rawness and simpleness of it all was enjoyable and novel.

I miss the dial-up BBS boards.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#240

Post by data_scientist »

kyledrake wrote: post #148
Apocryphon wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Neocities should add a webring feature.

Hi, founder of Neocities. I get this request a lot actually. The reason I decided to not do it was because webrings, though nice, had a lot of problems. The main issue was that people's sites would go away, and then the ring would break. I also didn't want to introduce any functionality that would make sites depend on Neocities backend APIs to function. Web sites are more long-term and durable if they remain (mostly)…

What about using machine learning? It sounds like a discovery issue, and recommender systems work very well for that (eg. the side bar of Youtube).

I just discovered Neocities BTW, it sounds very interesting!

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